My personal favourite for something that should not be pie: grades at school. I don't like places where by decree, only something like the top 5% of students are allowed to get a grade of 1 or whatever the highest one is. If one year more children/students do great work than usual, they should all get recognition for it!
I totally agree. Grading on a curve puts students into unnecessary competition with each other and can be an obstacle to learning to work together, an important preparation for the adult world. Besides, as you note, if a child has met a standard, why should s/he be punished with a low grade just because some other child got a higher score?
Lovely column, Mari. On the topic of the man-as-genuis trope, one could argue that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have done more damage to the U.S. with their solipsism and out-of-control financial aggressiveness than many another ordinary person, whether male or female, and yet their genius still gets referred to and credited. They may be geniuses, but they're also jerks of the highest order. That should matter, too.
An aside, Arthur grew up without pets, now loves dogs since we have had two dogs, but insists that cats are evil. He has taken the hierarchy to a whole new level!
This is an excellent point! Genius in only one piece of the pie (see what I did there?). Genius is necessary but not sufficient for society to thrive, and without ethics it is actively harmful.
And please let Arthur know that much as I love dogs, I have come to really like cats too and would gladly have one if not for Lynn! But I do appreciate the vote of support from Team Dog!
Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk are all complete evil assholes in their unwillingness to help the planet and the people living on it. However, only Zuckerberg and Bezos are also geniuses. Musk has never invented anything - he just purchases other people's ideas. In addition, even after purchasing someone else's idea, he sometimes doesn't even have enough intelligence to know how to use that idea successfully.
I agree that they are all hurting our country and our world, but I have to disagree about Musk. He is a genius too--he has an extraordinary ability to visualize machinery in three dimensions, which he has used to build his reusable rockets. He has been particularly good at looking at manufacturing processes and learning how to make them simpler. And if you make them simpler, you can make them much cheaper. So it’s a bit more complicated and interesting than just “he steals people’s ideas.” With the obvious exception of Twitter, he usually improves those ideas radically.
I also recently learned that he never took any money from his emerald-mine-owning father, who was abusive and never gave Elon a penny. He earned his first millions on his own.
With Musk as is so often the case in our discourse, it is tempting to say he is all good or all evil, and I would like to advocate for a middle way: he achieved extraordinary things, including creating a mass market for electric cars a generation sooner than the auto companies would have--and he has also gone insane and is now trying to tear the country apart. I highly recommend this podcast episode, which offers three theories for why Musk became so radicalized and now is a force for evil instead of good:
I read it more that the snail was relentlessly intent on killing me, even if one could argue that this is not stipulated. The essential premise seems to be that in return for getting the $10 million, you live a stressful life of constant vigilance and worry.
If so, I can't talk the snail out of its prime directive. But I could use some of my $10 million to build an escape-proof snail confinement. After all, it's a snail—even if it's immortal, it can't escape a metal box that is welded shut. Or, why not simply pay someone to transport the snail to Antarctica, from where it would take a snail longer to get to me than the number of years I have remaining in my life, even if the snail could swim through icy waters? Hell, I could even pay Elon Musk a million to launch the snail into earth orbit, unless of course it's a snail that's the size of a brachiosaurus. For that matter I could pay to have the snail sent to the moon, but that might use up all my money.
So yes, I'll gladly take the $10 million! I can finally buy that apartment in Trastevere with the rooftop garden terrace!
Now this is the kind of strategic thinking I can get behind! (And Trastevere is lovely! When we visited the neighborhood several years ago, they had set up big screen TVs in a public square so everyone in the neighborhood could watch the World Cup together. So nice!)
My personal favourite for something that should not be pie: grades at school. I don't like places where by decree, only something like the top 5% of students are allowed to get a grade of 1 or whatever the highest one is. If one year more children/students do great work than usual, they should all get recognition for it!
I totally agree. Grading on a curve puts students into unnecessary competition with each other and can be an obstacle to learning to work together, an important preparation for the adult world. Besides, as you note, if a child has met a standard, why should s/he be punished with a low grade just because some other child got a higher score?
Lovely column, Mari. On the topic of the man-as-genuis trope, one could argue that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have done more damage to the U.S. with their solipsism and out-of-control financial aggressiveness than many another ordinary person, whether male or female, and yet their genius still gets referred to and credited. They may be geniuses, but they're also jerks of the highest order. That should matter, too.
An aside, Arthur grew up without pets, now loves dogs since we have had two dogs, but insists that cats are evil. He has taken the hierarchy to a whole new level!
This is an excellent point! Genius in only one piece of the pie (see what I did there?). Genius is necessary but not sufficient for society to thrive, and without ethics it is actively harmful.
And please let Arthur know that much as I love dogs, I have come to really like cats too and would gladly have one if not for Lynn! But I do appreciate the vote of support from Team Dog!
Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk are all complete evil assholes in their unwillingness to help the planet and the people living on it. However, only Zuckerberg and Bezos are also geniuses. Musk has never invented anything - he just purchases other people's ideas. In addition, even after purchasing someone else's idea, he sometimes doesn't even have enough intelligence to know how to use that idea successfully.
I agree that they are all hurting our country and our world, but I have to disagree about Musk. He is a genius too--he has an extraordinary ability to visualize machinery in three dimensions, which he has used to build his reusable rockets. He has been particularly good at looking at manufacturing processes and learning how to make them simpler. And if you make them simpler, you can make them much cheaper. So it’s a bit more complicated and interesting than just “he steals people’s ideas.” With the obvious exception of Twitter, he usually improves those ideas radically.
I also recently learned that he never took any money from his emerald-mine-owning father, who was abusive and never gave Elon a penny. He earned his first millions on his own.
With Musk as is so often the case in our discourse, it is tempting to say he is all good or all evil, and I would like to advocate for a middle way: he achieved extraordinary things, including creating a mass market for electric cars a generation sooner than the auto companies would have--and he has also gone insane and is now trying to tear the country apart. I highly recommend this podcast episode, which offers three theories for why Musk became so radicalized and now is a force for evil instead of good:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/search-engine/id1614253637?i=1000621870984
Re: snail dilemma
I read it more that the snail was relentlessly intent on killing me, even if one could argue that this is not stipulated. The essential premise seems to be that in return for getting the $10 million, you live a stressful life of constant vigilance and worry.
If so, I can't talk the snail out of its prime directive. But I could use some of my $10 million to build an escape-proof snail confinement. After all, it's a snail—even if it's immortal, it can't escape a metal box that is welded shut. Or, why not simply pay someone to transport the snail to Antarctica, from where it would take a snail longer to get to me than the number of years I have remaining in my life, even if the snail could swim through icy waters? Hell, I could even pay Elon Musk a million to launch the snail into earth orbit, unless of course it's a snail that's the size of a brachiosaurus. For that matter I could pay to have the snail sent to the moon, but that might use up all my money.
So yes, I'll gladly take the $10 million! I can finally buy that apartment in Trastevere with the rooftop garden terrace!
Now this is the kind of strategic thinking I can get behind! (And Trastevere is lovely! When we visited the neighborhood several years ago, they had set up big screen TVs in a public square so everyone in the neighborhood could watch the World Cup together. So nice!)